Did you miss our Warrior TV event with Oli Gardner? These are the highlights of what the Unbounce co-founder discussed in the interview.

Oli was then a hardcore programmer in a financial district in London. When he moved to Canada in 2000, he worked for a startup company where he met three of the six Unbounce co-founders. When they were laid off from their jobs, they joined forces and launched Unbounce.com in August 2009.

Oli’s branding obsession began when he named their company Unbounce. After that, he discovered a special interest and a knack for naming everything that needs to be named. One of the popular terms Oli coined is Conversion Centered Design (CCD) which is about (1) using psychology and persuasive design to increase conversions and (2) driving visitors toward one action.

Best Practices for Landing Page Designs

One of the vital points Oli mentioned is to understand exactly where your visitors are at. If you don’t understand where your visitors are or what their expectations are, you’re just going to fail.

The landing page expert also emphasized the need for frameworks and tools for research to identify pain points. Furthermore, Oli advised not to build a landing page without a campaign goal and that you should never run a marketing campaign without a landing page.

Fundamentals in Constructing a Meaningful Landing Page

Oli described the landing page simply as a dedicated destination designed specifically for a marketing campaign. You need a website optimization tool (like Optimizely) and a landing page tool (like Unbounce). Your landing page needs your value proposition, a hero shot (video, imagery), some benefit statements, social proof, and call to action.

If you have a customer support team, talk to them first before you create a landing page because they’re the ones who know your customer’s pain points the best.

Principles of Conversion Centered Design

How can you increase your landing page conversion? Apply these seven principles of CCD:

1. Attention. Two main components for this principle are (1) attention ratio - the number of things you can do on a page and the number of things you should be doing and (2) attention-driven design.

2. Context. This is all about the post-click experience. The entire goal of the landing page is to deliver the promise made prior to clicking the button or link that led the visitor to the page. There should be message matching and design matching between what they see pre-click and post-click.

3. Clarity. This is being able to communicate really quickly what you’re offer is, who you are, what the benefit of talking to you is.

4. Congruence. Every element of your page should be aligned with your campaign goal.

5. Credibility. Use social proof to establish credibility.

6. Closing. This refers to the psychological triggers at the point of conversion; things closely positioned near your CTA

7. Continuation. This includes the post-conversion process; do lead generation by asking something.

Mobile Landing Pages

Oli’s suggestion is to design a specific mobile experience by cutting the non-essentials and just showing what you want to highlight based on the experience you want your visitors to have.

Advice for People Looking to Start Inbound Marketing

Oli recommended to do guest posts when you’re starting out. Also, focus on building your social following so you can have a venue where people will listen and where you could share what you’ve written. “Don’t be afraid to go big!” shared Oli.

On Design Trends

Oli mentioned how they do this roundup of things at the end of every year and a list of predictions for the upcoming year. But for Oli, “The truth is, you’ll never know.”

What he thinks is important though, is there are design trends that need to be tested. People blindly implement design trends without testing them (things like ghost button, parallax scrolling, and carousels with autoplay). “The important thing is to observe trends and implement very carefully,” said Oli.

Videos in Landing Pages

The only time Oli recommends autoplay is when someone clicked on a thumbnail of the play button on, for example, an email you sent out. That means that person asked to watch the video so you have to give it automatically and not direct the viewer to a different page.

“Unless your page is just about the video, only 10% or 20% typically watch it so you have to communicate its value assuming people want to watch it,” said Oli. Putting a caption at the bottom of the video is a way to tell people of its value and entice them to view it.

Biggest Conversion Rate Mistake People Do When They’re Starting

Oli’s thoughts on this? Testing for no reason. You have to have an observed pain and a hypothesis to fix it. Run test only if you have a reason to. Calling test too early is another mistake, too.

Tools Oli Recommends

Hotjar - to know what users want based on their clicks and scrolling behavior

Scrollmaps - to understand visitor engagement and see the amount of time they spend on each sections of your website

​When it comes to landing pages, the three main things are attention, context, and clarity.

Deliver on the promise you made.

Have the courage to introduce your business to people. Do this often and eventually you’ll be better at it, and your value proposition will be stronger.

The video recording of this Warrior TV event with Oli Gardner is now available on Warrior Forum. Watch it here.

About Warrior TV: WAMA Events: Hosted by Warrior Forum,Warrior Ask Me Anything (WAMA) events are Q&A video interviews where the world’s top Internet Marketers and entrepreneurs share their strategies that have helped them become industry icons.